The Case of the Creative Crime

「月に代わっておしおきよ」

『美少女戦士セーラームーン」

 "In the name of the moon, I'll punish you!"
"Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon"

I have only been to an anime/manga fan convention once in my life actually, and that was mostly as a panelist/sitting at a booth. Though I guess sitting at the booth at the November Festival of Kyoto University selling the Kyoto University Mystery Club annual magazine was a similar experience, even if that wasn't an anime convention...

Just before Professor Tsukihime passed away after a suspicious accident, he confided to his daughter Rin that he and his people at the Tsukihime Science Laboratory had been working on a suit called the Amplifier, which powers up the wearer. Professor Tsukihime had been working on four sets of suits in order to battle the evil Shadow Empire and their leader Schatten, but he has one final hope: Rin was actually one of the four girls who were selected to wear the suit, being completely compatible with its specifications. Vowing to avenge her father's death and to carry on his mission, Rin manages to find the three other girls who were selected to don Amplifiers, and helped by their allies at the Tsukihime Science Laboratory and Colonel Fester, an American army man and friend of Professor Tsukihime, the Powered Quartet has been succesful in fighting off attacks by the mysterious Shadow Empire. But one evening, while everyone is relaxing, the alarms go off at the Tsukihime Science Laboratory. Rin immediately transforms in her powered form, but learns that the "intruder" was only a dummy. She quickly goes Saki's room, which is right next to her's, to check up on Saki, but is shocked to find Saki, in powered form, lying on the floor with a dagger in her back. But the intruder was a fake, so who could've killed Saki? Rin is even convinced she never heard anyone come up the stairs until she found Saki, and the only people on this floor were Saki, their friend Colonel Fester and Rin herself. Is there a traitor within the Tsukihime Science Laboratory....?

That is the big cliffhanger of volume 6 of Lunatic Dream, a succesful sci-fi bishojo sentai mystery novel series by Takasawa Noriko, of which an anime adaptation has recently started airing. Takasawa was originally a mystery novelist, and Lunatic Dream certainly has mystery-elements too, as shown by the shocking cliffhanger, and that's also the reason why the members of the dojin circle A Large Teashop have been a fan of the series too. In an earlier dojinshi (fanzine/self-published book) published by the group, they challenged each other to predict what would happen in the coming volumes of Lunatic Dream, and some of them got really close, so it is decided that for the upcoming summer Comiket, the world's greatest anime/manga/game convention, they'll do a similar book. The upcoming volume 7 will be the final volume of Lunatic Dream, so their new book Wish Upon The Moon will feature stories by each of the members of A Large Teashop where they'll try to predict how Saki's murder in the Tsukihime Science Laboratory will be solved and also how Lunatic Dream will end. On the hot summer day that is August 17, the members of A Large Teashop make their way to Harumi, where Comiket is held. As sellers, the members all arrive early at the convention site, preparing their booth, but also to swing by the special booth of the printer, as they had Wish Upon The Moon delivered straight to Comiket. But when they unpack the box and check the books, they find the final few pages of the book have been swapped with one new page, which says "Everyone who worked on this book shall be killed.", signed by "The Shadow". Every printed copy of their book has this page, but they have no idea how this page got there, as they checked each and every page to see if there were no swapped or missing pages, before handing it in at the printer's weeks ago. They obviouly can't sell Wish Upon The Moon as it is now, so they are forced to rely on stock of older books. Because some of the members also have their own personal booths, the group scatters once the regular visitors are admitted inside, with enormous crowds (often in cosplay!) flowing inside the various convention buildings. But after a few hours, a dead body is found inside one of the bathroom stalls, and the victim turns out to be one of the members of A Large Teashop. News of this hasn't really spread yet, when another member at her own personal booth is poisoned and drops dead and this isn't the end of it... Who is killing the members of A Large Teashop during Comiket, and how are their deaths related to their predictions about Saki's murder in Wish Upon The Moon? The answer lies in Komori Kentarou's Comiket Satsujin Jiken, or as the cover also says: The Comicket Murder Case (1994). And yes, the cover says Comicket, probably because an official English spelling hadn't been decided yet at the time.

Comiket Satsujin Jiken is the debut work of Komori Kentarou, though it might not have been in a different imeline. Over ten years ago, I read Komori's Lowell-jou no Misshitsu ("The Locked Room in the Castle Lowell"), also a book with a comic book background, and in the afterword of Comiket Satsujin Jiken, it is mentioned that Lowell-jou no Misshitsu actually made it to the final selection round of the Edogawa Rampo Prize (which is a prize which involves the publication of an unpublished book). So Lowell-jou no Misshitsu had almost been Komori's debut work and was in fact published after Comiket Satsujin Jiken as his second book. Anyway, in our timeline, his debut work is Comiket Satsujin Jiken, and in a way, it does feel like one. For this book is absolutely packed with ideas, and you can tell Komori just wanted to do everyhing he wanted to do in this book, and as a complete package, the book has a lot of interesting elements to it.

I have to say that I didn't know much about the book before I got started on it: it was just the idea of a murder mystery occuring at Comiket that really atttracted me. I have never been to Comiket, but anyone who has been interested in anime/manga/games for some time will at some time have heard about the world's largest fan convention. In particular, Comiket is a fan-driven convention with a focus on fan-created content, mostly dojinshi, or self-published fanzines and comics (usually based on existing IPs) or for example self-published video games. It's of course also well known for all the cosplay going on. I haven't much experience with anime conventions myself, having only done a panel once and hanging around while waiting for my panel, so never really been there as a "regular visitor", but still, the idea of a murder mystery at a fan convention just sounded a lot of fun, as booths, cosplay, the crowd and all of that provided a lot of potential.

So imagine my surprise when Komori didn't only use that, but added a whole story-within-a-story. Two of them, actually. First Komori come up with the fictional novel and anime series Lunatic Dream, a bishojo sentai series in the vein of Sailor Moon, which of course provides us with the in-universe murder of Saki in the Tsukihime Science Laboratory, which seems impossible at first sight, or at least inexplicable (only Rin, Saki and Colonel Fester were upstairs, but suppose Fester was the murderer... why would he do that under those circumstances?). In Wish Upon The Moon, the seven members of A Large Tea Shop all wrote something short where they try to explain the murder of Saki. The result is a kind of The Poisoned Chocolates Case-type of fanzine. We get to read all of the contributions of the seven members, and they all tackle the problem differently. Some really see it as a mystery story to be solved and try to build a very tight theory based on the clues in a formal essay, others are less interested in the mystery and more in the characters, leading to "normal" fan fiction that serve as character studies that focus on motive. The highlight is perhaps the solution that is completely written as a parody of Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken, complete with all the pedantic talk! Because the initial situation of Saki's death is only explained very briefly and you as the reader don't know much about Lunatic Dream, it's not really the intention of the author for the reader to guess all these possible solutions to Saki's murder (a lot of information about the series you'll only first hear mentioned when applied to a theory), but it's fun to see how these different members all try to come up with something different to the problem, and also utilize completely different writing styles and angles. None of the solutions to Saki's semi-locked room murder are really impressive or memorable on their own, but it's fun seeing the members of A Large Teashop having fun with the idea, and it's really catchy. What is also fun is that Wish Upon The Moon is really ncluded within Comiket Satsujin Jiken. The main narrative of Comiket Satsujin Jiken is actually printed on the pages in double columns, while the chapters of Wish Upon The Moon are printed like normal, clearly seperating the Wish Upon The Moon part from the rest of the book, and Wish Upon the Moon also includes fan art of Lunatic Dream and other typical fanzine parts. The book of Comiket Satsujin Jiken also has a different Lunatic Dream cover beneath the slipcover, and it's things like this that make Comiket Satsujin Jiken fun to read as a physical book, playing with the covers and the typesetting and all of that!

And then there's the main story of Comiket Satsujin Jiken too! Komori makes great use of the unique setting that is Comiket that arrive at an interesting problem: several members are killed in the span of a few hours and as all the victims are members of A Large Teashop, it is of course suspected the murderer is one of the remaining members, but there is one problem: how could the murderer have commited these murders during Comiket? While basically none of the remaining members have full alibis for every single second, as they'd sometimes wander away from their booth, go buy some dojinshi themselves at other stands or of course just go out to buy something to drink or eat or to use the toilet, none of them were gone for very long, and fact is: you need a loooooooot of time to move around at the convention site once it's open for visitors. In particular, one victim had her own stand on the floor above, but due to the gigantic crowd on the spiral staircase going up, and with rows of customers circling around the stand floor, it would have taken almost 50 minutes for anyone to make their way from the A Large Teashop stand up and back down, and of course, somebody would've noticed if someone had been gone for nearly an hour. This idea of an alibi due to the crowd of Comiket is nicely found, as are other ideas as some members proving their alibi by showing they had been making an illustration in a sketchbook for a customer, again a very typical con thing. Komori wrote this book after his own visits to Comiket (nowadays of course held at Tokyo Big Sight, but this was back when it was held at Harumi a few times), and the place really becomes alive as Komori describes everything at Comiket, from the people manning the booths and preparing for opening, to the visitors doing cosplay and taking pictures to Comiket staff members trying to keep things safe for everyone. A lot of the mystery-related ideas like the alibis and all depend on the unique convention setting, so that's a lot of fun. Not all of the ideas are particularly remarkable (some parts could've been clewed a little bit more I think, like how the trick surrounding the first murder), but Komori manages to tie these ideas to specifically the Comiket setting really well and it's by doing this several times in a row, you do feel that as a whole, the book works as a mystery novel. Other ideas behind how the murderer managed to swap the final pages of Wish Upon the Moon with the threat page or things like the motive work in the context of the book I think, and while not particularly memorable, all of these ideas do really tie in well with the setting. The fact the book actually features photographs of Comiket (from back then) also helps set the mood.

There's also a lot of "general" Comiket talk, as the members of A Large Teashop explain what Comiket is to the police inspector, so you could read this without any prior knowledge of Comiket, though I suspect most people reading this book, or even this review, will at least have heard of Comiket. Funny is the talk about the presence of mystery fiction at Comiket by the way. The book is written early 90s, but there are mentions of things like being able to find dojinshi of Shimada Souji's work, which I think isn't an invention by Komori for this book, but really what was found at Comiket back then, and he very probably means Mitarai X Ishioka smut. Oh, and one final interesting to note: when Comiket Satsujin Jiken was reprinted as a paperback pocket, it was accompanied by a seperate new release: Lunatic Dream was a manga, drawn by the artist who did the cover art of the paperback pocket and written by Komori Kentarou and it was basically the in-universe series Lunatic Dream, now told as a seperate, full story. I haven't read it, but it's supposed to be reasonably fun. There are stories that some book shops back then didn't place this book near the mystery novels though, even though only mystery fans would've known what Lunatic Dream is.

Anyway, Comiket Satsujin Jiken is a book that's absolutely stuffed: a story-within-a-story, multiple solutions to a locked room murder, a full Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken parody, essays, fan art, a series of semi-impossible murders happening at the biggest fan convention in the world, observations on fan culture in the late eighties/early nineties. You can tell Komori absolutely loved working on the book, and that's not just the story of the book, but all the way down to physical traits of the book like double covers and making use of the lay-out to highlight the fanzine within this book. Taking the tricks on their own, a lot of them are quite simple, and some characters do have very little screentime (though you do get to learn them via their contributions to Wish Upon the Moon), but it's Komori's sheer enthusisasm for everything that goes in in this book and the unique setting that really won me over. Definitely worth a read if the idea of a murder case happening at a fan convention appeals to you.

Original Japanese title(s): 小森健太郎『コミケ殺人事件』